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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Obama Finally Releases Long-Form Birth Certificate

President Barack Obama finally after more than three years of debate over whether he was born in Hawaii has released his original, long-form birth certificate establishing his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii, which you can view here. While the birth certificate resolves his place of birth, it does not resolve whether he is a natural born citizen as I've repeatedly pointed out for the past three years. My research and analysis of the eligibility requirements under Article II of the U.S. Constitution has led me to conclude that only children born of U.S. citizen parents are natural born citizens. By his own admission, Obama was born a dual citizen because his father was a Kenyan, which at the time was a British commonwealth. That made Obama both a U.S. citizen and a British citizen at birth. Many people mistakenly conclude that the 14th Amendment altered the natural born citizen analysis, making everyone born on U.S. soil citizens regardless of their parent's citizenship. U.S. Rep. John Bingham of Ohio was the author of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment specifically chose the word "citizen" rather than "natural born citizen", a term that is used but once in the U.S. Constitution to define a person's eligibility to serve as president. Prior to the enactment of the 14th Amendment, Bingham said during debate on the floor of the House:

“All from other lands, who by the terms of [congressional] laws and a compliance with their provisions become naturalized, are adopted citizens of the United States; all other persons born within the Republic, of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty, are natural born citizens. Gentleman can find no exception to this statement touching natural-born citizens except what is said in the Constitution relating to Indians.” (Cong. Globe, 37th, 2nd Sess., 1639 (1862)).

He then stated the following a few years later:

“Every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.” (Cong. Globe, 39th, 1st Sess., 1291 (1866)).

To be sure, Bingham later pondered the status of a Dr. Houard who had been incarcerated in Spain. The issue was raised during debate on the floor whether he was a U.S. citizen. Rep. Bingham explained:

“As to the question of citizenship I am willing to resolve all doubts in favor of a citizen of the United States. That Dr. Houard is a natural-born citizen of the United States there is not room for the shadow of a doubt. He was born of naturalized parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, and by the express words of the Constitution, as amended to-day, he is declared to all the world to be a citizen of the United States by birth.” (The term “to-day”, as used by Bingham, means “to date”. Obviously, the Constitution had not been amended on April 25, 1872.).

As Leo Donofrio has explained at his Natural Born Citizen blog, Bingham was an abolitionist who prosecuted Lincoln's assassins. Donofrio notes the Congressional Record does not indicate any disagreement with the views he expressed on the meaning of the term "natural born citizen" both before and after the adoption of the 14th Amendment which he authored.

The debate over whether Obama was born in Hawaii or elsewhere has really been a diversion from the real constitutional issue based on the undisputed fact that Obama was a dual citizen at birth. The matter is further clouded by evidence he and his mother immigrated to Indonesia where he was adopted by an Indonesian citizen, Lolo Soetoro, and became a citizen of Indonesia according to his school records under the adopted name, "Barry Soetoro."

This is not unlike the situation that arose over the eligibility of Chester Arthur to serve as president. Arthur was the Vice-President to President James Garfield who succeeded him as president after Garfield was assassinated in 1881. Some of Arthur's opponents claimed he was not a natural born citizen because he allegedly was born in Canada. His father immigrated from Scotland to Canada and then later to Vermont where family records showed he was born. In recent years, a discovery has been made that Arthur lied about several matters concerning his biographical narrative, a task not easily undertaken because Arthur had ordered all of his personal and official papers burned. As it turned out, Arthur lied about his date of birth and that of his father, who had not yet become a naturalized citizen at the time of his birth, thus calling into doubt his natural born citizenship status. By focusing on the allegation he was born in Canada instead of Vermont, he was able to avoid the issue of not being born to U.S. citizen parents. The distraction over Obama's place of birth has similarly succeeded in diverting attention from the real question: Can a dual citizen at birth by virtue of a parent's foreign citizenship be considered a natural born citizen?

UPDATE: Leo Donofrio offers his reaction to Obama's release of his long-form birth certificate. He bemoans like me the fact that the debate over his place of birth has succeeded in diverting attention away from the legal question of his dual citizenship at birth rendering him ineligible to hold the office:

I predicted multiple times that President Obama would produce the original long form birth certificate when it best served him to do so. Today that prophecy was fulfilled. I have always maintained that the birth certificate issue was a red herring smoke screen protecting Obama from facing the true issue of his ineligibility – dual nationality.

Like Chester Arthur before him, Obama was protected from genuine questions regarding his birth status having been governed, as he admits, by the United Kingdom via the faux BC issue until October 27, 2008 when I instituted my law suit against the New Jersey Secretary of State alleging that neither Obama nor McCain were eligible.

I predicted over and again that when it served Obama best, he would feed you an original birth certificate on national TV. Bon appetit to those who allowed this conspiracy theory to take precedence over the genuine legal issue: how a person born owing certain allegiance to a foreign nation can be a natural born citizen of the United States?. Since the BC was played so perfectly by the Obama team, the genuine legal issue will now be more marginalized than ever.

They simply played a better game of chess. And due to this sick game, Obama now sets a precedent that anyone who hates this country, from Osama Bin Laden to Kim Jong Il, can have a child with an American woman and that child can be President. Obama’s defeat of the dual nationality issue, in both the courts and the media, means that the President’s parents do not have to be US citizens. If that is true, then the natural born citizen requirement in Article 2 Section 1 of the Constitution is basically rendered meaningless.

If a person born with dual allegiance can be President, then I don’t see the difference between a citizen and a natural born citizen. To become naturalized as a US citizen, one must at least swear an oath of allegiance to the US by renouncing all other allegiances. But a person such as Obama, who was born with dual allegiance is apparently not even required to renounce all previous allegiances under oath.

The BC was a conspiracy theory. The dual nationality issue is a legal question. Obama always controlled the issue of whether or not he would produce the BC. But the legal issue was never under his control. So he exercised as much control over it as possible by allowing the birth certificate to fester casting a huge shadow over his dual allegiance. Well played, sir.

Donald Trump, who pushed the issue onto the front-burner through his persistent demands in recent weeks that Obama produce his long-form certificate, is taking credit for its release today. "I am so proud of myself because I've accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish," Trump said from Portsmouth, N.H., where he was giving early primary voters a close-up look at a potential presidential campaign. "I feel I've accomplished something really, really important and I'm honored for it," Trump said.

Locally, WISH-TV's State House reporter Jim Shella, never known for objective reporting, is continuing to dog Sen. Mike Delph for his continued pursued of presidential eligibility legislation that would require all presidential candidates to furnish their birth certificates as proof of their eligibility to hold the office in order to gain access to Indiana's ballot. “Why aren’t we already doing this?,” Delph responded rhetorically to Shella's question.

UPDATE: Document experts are already saying the document is forged. Check out one analysis here. A YouTube illustration here shows layering of the PDF document. I'm not a document expert so I don't know whether their points are legit or just a smoke and mirrors attempt to delegitimize the document. The former health director claims she saw his long-form birth certificate in the archives.

What I find interesting is that as recently as a few days ago, the Hawaii Dept. of Health kept insisting it does not furnish long-form birth certificates. There were numerous posting of images of long-form birth certificates other Hawaii residents had obtained from the Dept. even within the last year. Why did they lie about something the state law clearly provided persons were entitled to get from the department?

Ellen, You ignorant ..... I have never challenged the issue of whether he is a citizen, only a natural born citizen. It's a sad commentary that we've dumbed down our people on the meaning of their Constitution to the point where people like you are incapable of grasping the distinction between a citizen and a natural born citizen.

If he was born in Hawaii, he is a natural born citizen. 8 USC 1401(a).

If he was born outside the US, he is a natural born citizen because even though his father was an alien, his mother was a US citizen who, prior to his birth, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years. 8 USC 1401(g).

But this whole thing is still a disaster for Obama, who is getting hammered now to release his college and law school records, too.

A statute that makes a person a citizen at birth does not negate the meaning of natural born citizen. This point has been gone over repeatedly. A federal statute cannot change the meaning of a constitutional term.

First, I tend to agree with you and Ellen. This is a pure distraction. There are a lot more important issues to get tied up over than this issue. (By the way I feel McCain had a lot less of a case of claiming to be a natural born citizen than Obama).

Secondly, using your definition of "Natural Born Citizen" you are opening up a real can of worms. Have you ever looked at the citizenship laws of the various countries throughout the world. More U.S. citizens than you realize may have dual or at least an inchoate right to citizenship in another country than you . . . or even they realize. The most obvious example is Israel. Should Jews be excluded from the Presidency since by right of the Law of Return they have the option claiming Israeli citizenship. Many countries give children of Naturalized U.S. citizens the right to reclaim the citizenship their parents left behind . . . some even permit grandchildren to reclaim such citizenship rights.

Marv, A lot of people dislike the natural born citizenship requirement in the Consitution. Like it or not, it's there. When people didn't like that women had no right to vote, they amended the Constitution to change that. When people didn't think it was fair that 18-year-olds were sent off to war to fight for their country but couldn't vote, they amended the Constitution. The liberal thinking today says we can simply rewrite any provision of the Constitution we don't like to meet our contemporary thinking on any issue. At that point, the document ceases to be worth the paper it is written on. Everything in it is subject to the whim of what a majority of the members of the Supreme Court decides it means at any given time. We cease to be a nation of laws and become a nation of men.

Good questions, Melyssa, which should have been heard and answered by the Supreme Court given the legitimacy concerns that have ensued. The elites have no idea how much the government's legitimacy among the masses has eroded over the last several years. People have reached a point where they don't believe anything the government tells them anymore, and there is good reason for it. We've been lied to on so many important issues. Obama could have travelled to Pakistan at the time on a U.S. passport, although State Department advisories would have warned against travel there. As I understand it, he travelled with a friend whose father was a high-ranking person within the Pakistani government and stayed with the friend's family during his visit. Quite unusual for a relative unknown boy from Honolulu.

"African" would not have been the nomenclature typically used in that period. More likely it would have said "Negro" or "Black." A person from Egypt or a white South African would never be described as "African" for purposes of listing one's race. Perhaps blacks were such a rarity in Hawaii they didn't know better.

"A federal statute cannot change the meaning of a constitutional term." is your quote...but all the time federal statutes attempt to add or expand on constitutional prose. And in this case they did exactly that. By your own admission the words "natural born citizen" is open to interpretation. His mother was born in Kansas, his father in Kenya, he was born in Hawaii. His mother, a natural born american gave birth to him on american soil, in an american hospital. There is no legal issue here. He was born here. And the issue of Indonesia is laughable. He was a child, he did not have the ability to give up his American citizenship when he was a child. Please Gary, I enjoy your writing but this you must let go...the guy is the legitimate President of the United States

Your right, Kip. The very first Immigration and Naturalization Act defined the term "natural born citizen" as follows:

"the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States."

That enactment was repealed a few years later. Note Obama's father was in the U.S. only as a student on a non-immigrant visa; he was not a permanent resident. That law would have saved McCain but not Obama if the Supreme Court had ever ruled on its validity.

You misunderstand my comment. Should someone born in the U.S. of at least one U.S. parent (particularly a U.S. mother since fatherhood is always a matter of faith) be denied the presidency because a second country decides he qualifies for citizenship in that country even if that person never takes any steps to claim that citizenship.

Or, if as a minor child his parents decided to pursue citizenship in another nation. Should that person be denied the presidency even if once he reached majority he renounces the other country's citizenship and lives as a U.S citizen.

According to your logic if the King of the Kingdom of Boobastan declared all U.S. citizens are also Boobastanians then no one could be president.

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